Townie family generation, curious

I think there are just certain names that get overused for some reason. I have similar patterns, and as far as I know there are no relationships between families randomly generated with the same name. I play with MCCC and that can cause divorce, and for one parent to each take one child, but I don't believe the EA game will naturally generate that. I have also never seen it generate a whole family. I believe that it just requires a certain number of children to exist in the world, and since they can't live in a household by themselves, the game just creates a parent for them.

"mightysprite;d-990644" wrote:
Salim Benali has been starting to get a little friendlier with his good friend Tanvi Savalani, who I think is a randomly generated townie. He knew she was a stay-at-home mom. I moved Tanvi and her child Sai into an apartment so that Salim could go visit them. In the process, I noticed another Savalani household with a dad and a child.
https://i.ibb.co/dmwPkCH/savalani.png

I didn't want to peek at Tanvi and Sai's relationships and family tree, because I don't want to know anything Salim doesn't know about them just yet, but I wonder if they are related-- perhaps divorced-- as the children do look like a mix of both parents?

Then I got curious and looked through the other households. I found some Gotos who don't look like each other at all
https://i.ibb.co/pb6VrX9/goto.png

some Mahajans who look like sisters (one of these is Salim's neighbor)
https://i.ibb.co/ngqdQXx/mahajan.png

and some Acharyas and Hashimotos who are like the Savalanis, separate households but the kids look like a mix of the adults.
(Or well, on second thought, maybe the Acharya kids don't resemble the adults from both households as much as the Hashimotos and Savalanis do.)
https://i.ibb.co/zRGHs48/acharya.png
https://i.ibb.co/ynn8jKB/hashimoto.png

And then I noticed something odd. No townie families with kids have 2 parents in the home, except for the premades. It's all single parents.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

I’ve never had 2 parents either.
The odd townie families I get are always a mom, teenage girl and boy child. No variation.

The only different families are ones I make or come with packs I.e. Jang family in City Living

Sometimes I’ll get couples but most of my townies are elder Sims who stomp round my town angrily until I go through the townie pool and delete them.

I’ve not had the same family name duplicated though.

"Chazzzy;c-17904171" wrote:
Look at them adding broken homes into our games lol

They reuse the same last names often I've noticed. I wouldn't think anything of it.

That would make random townies more interesting ?.

I agree, there are a lot of names that are repeated with the randomly generated townies.

@GirafHuntr ah okay that's probably why- game generating a parent so the child doesn't live alone.
@Chazzzy haha yes I thought maybe it serves me right for playing so many nontraditional families in the first place, the game gave up altogether on trying to interest me in standard nuclear families :D

What do you guys think of the genetics though? Like, look at the little boy in the Savalani household on the right. He is the spitting image of Tanvi, the woman in the Savalani household on the left. And Tanvi's child Sai looks like a combination of her and the man in the household on the right.
And the little Hashimoto girl looks a lot more like the Hashimoto woman who lives alone, than like the father in her own household.

@mightysprite I really think it’s coincidental. I would personally use the SearchSimsInfo mod to just double check but I would be absolutely shocked if they were related. Definitely post back here and let us know when you are ready to pull back the curtain and won’t ruin your storytelling.

Do you have MCCC? On its default settings it's like it's obsessed with broken homes and non-sequitur affairs. It renames families patrilineally by default. Looking at NPC family trees can be a rude awakening!

"mightysprite;c-17906465" wrote:
@derevaun no, I don't use mods. That sounds like it would be very chaotic!

I love MCCC so much. I don't have mine set chaotic at all. I actually have it set so that only Sims in active romantic relationships can have babies together (generally that ends up being married couples). I did try to allow it to be more open but it quickly became ridiculous.

"ncisGibbs02;c-17904154" wrote:

"mightysprite;d-990644" wrote:

And then I noticed something odd. No townie families with kids have 2 parents in the home, except for the premades. It's all single parents.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

I’ve never had 2 parents either.
The odd townie families I get are always a mom, teenage girl and boy child. No variation.

I'm having this issue too. It seems to be by design.

For me, almost all of these townies follow a specific design of single black mother with a teenage black daughter and a blond, blue eyed white child son. The daughter's features will look like they came from the genetics system but the boy will look completely different.

MCCC then goes in and assigns these to houses they don't fit in - and puts single townies into the big houses - that's a mod and I get that it can't tell house info even if I've labeled them...

But the game itself is making those repeated townie families.

Exactly once it's given me a single dad with 2 sons and a daughter - all teens that I recall though I might have aged one up to teen.

This pattern is very weird. I've been spending the last few days essentially "making dads"... Leaving a few families as single parent but filling out the bulk of them. And of course fixing what houses townies got assigned to if I like them enough to want them to stay around (most of my 'played' households began as random townies).


MCCC helps me avoid many issues in all of this - it limits the number of random homeless elders, but it can't seem to stop the generation of 'child' sims (I always edit those sons up to teen). And I have a pile of settings in it to go around my list of townies every week and clean out all the facial piercings, makeup, etc... because the game seems to love using extreme bright makeup on dark skin too look like some racist cartoon, and to give adult and elder sims every possible face piercing in my CAS library, even the ones I've disabled 'random' on... so MCCC is near mandatory for me or I'd have to hand edit dozens of townies daily to avoid going nuts.

The city living name list that the game picks names from is quite small, so that's why so many townies from city living are named the same.

The families that generate with a child and single parent are the kids in the adoption pool. I make over all of my townies and those kids come up in the adoption menu.

I wish they would generate actual families that go out and do things together. It would make things so much more simple. Right now I usually download families from the gallery and make them townies. Then I make them be in a club so they will be seen around town doing specific things depending on what type of family dynamic I'm going for. It's so time consuming getting my town running and when patches break my game, it could take over a month to get it playable again.